Lead singer of Doves Jez Williams says he agrees with Noel Gallagher that artists like Ed Sheeran are boring.

“The middle ground is all a bit boring, but then it always had been,“ says the 38-year-old. “It’s for people who are a bit lazy, they can’t be arsed to look for their own kind of music, and it’s just fed to them in mass consuming currency.

“There is good music out there, but it’s a noisy world.“ So why, in what he admits is an increasingly competitive industry, did chart-toppers Doves decide to take a hiatus in 2010 after racking up two No 1 albums and having their final album to date, Kingdom of Rust, enter the charts at No 2?

Jez insists there was no big falling out – they just needed a break.

“It’s like a dysfunctional family, you love and hate each other at times. Everything was on the verge of ’I can’t take this anymore’, it could be down to the way someone eats a bag of crisps. That close confinement can be the last straw, and little things like that can be a big thing.“

But given that twins Jez and Andy have been playing together since they were six, it’s unsurprising that in 2012 they reconvened and are now back with new band Black Rivers, who will be supporting Noel Gallagher’s band High Flying Birds, at The O2 tomorrow (March 10).

“It’s gonna be great, Noel is an old friend and big Doves fan.“ The brothers have been working quietly away on the new project for a while.

“Me and Andy started writing at the end of 2012 and it was just very organic. I had done some DJing and Andy had built a new studio in his garden, and we just thought ’let’s just hang out and see what happens’. Once we had written a few songs we realised we had a bit of a sound growing.“

Their release last year The Ship was a “statement of intent“ that this is a big step away from Doves and the songs on the début album have been inspired by immigrants.

“They are very much about wanting to travel to a another place to possibly have escapism. A lot of them have that idea of wanting to get out to a better place. It’s quite an adventurous album, quite schizophrenic.

The name Black Rivers was picked and Jez admits the album of the same name is dark in places.

“The more you live on this planet the more you pick up that not everything is happy clappy,“ he says hinting at harder times.

They still see Doves’ third member Jimi Goodwin regularly, but fans shouldn’t expect to see them reforming any time soon.

“At the moment we are concentrating on Black Rivers because it’s not a side project, it’s a real band.

For him music is a calling.

“If I get up in the morning and haven’t written a song I feel something is amiss. It’s almost like a destined thing to do that is out of my control.

“With these gigs we are almost losing money because it’s costing us to play ,but hopefully it will all come back and karma will restore that balance.“

The O2, Peninsula Square, SE10 0DX, Tuesday, March 10. Details: 0844 856 0202, theo2.co.uk